Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff: on Principles & Values

Barack Obama: Accused by Trump & Fox News of wiretapping Trump Tower

On March 4, Trump's early morning tweets began:
• Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found! This is McCarthyism! (4:35 AM)
• Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wiretapping" a race for president prior to an election? (4:49 AM)
• How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. (5:02 AM)

Donald Trump: OpEd: Replaces art of the compromise with art of conflict

[On Trump's staff,] you defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait -- hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

Donald Trump: OpEd: input on options from multiple advisers

[Trump wanted all three options, and each appealed to Trump in their own way]: Bannon offered a rousing fxxx-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery from the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip businessmen.

Donald Trump: Fixated on personal dignity, uprightness, and respectability

His is a 1950s businessman sort of ideal. Personal dignity--that is, apparent uprightness and respectability--is one of his fixations. Formality and convention--before he became president, almost everybody without high celebrity or a billion dollars called him "Mr. Trump"--are a central part of his identity. Casualness is the enemy of pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand stood for power, wealth, arrival.

Mike Pence: OpEd: extreme self-effacement: "I do funerals & cut ribbons"

Pence started nearly every speech saying, "I bring greetings from our forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump--"--a salutation directed more to the president than to the audience.

Pence cast himself as blandly uninteresting, sometimes barely seeming to exist in the shadow of Donald Trump. Little leaked out of the Pence side of the White House.

In a sense, he had solved the riddle of how to serve as the junior partner to a president who could not tolerate any kind of comparisons: extreme self-effacement.

Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing.

Paul Ryan: Broke story of Obama wiretapping Trump Tower; called it "BS"

On March 4, Trump's early morning tweets began: "Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found! This is McCarthyism! (4:35 AM)" This was a pure public exclamation, a window into pain and frustration. With his misspellings and his use of 1970s lingo--"wiretapping" called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van of Fifth Avenue--it seemed farcical. Ryan said he had no idea what Baier was talking about and that he was just BSing through the interview.

It was a turning point. Until now, Trump's inner circle had been mostly game to defend him. But after the wiretap tweets, everybody, moved into a state of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity. [The wiretapping allegation survives into the 2020 campaign]